Monthly Archives: February 2015

Cute is not Almost Alright: Jerde Partners and the American Shopping Experience

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It is unfortunate that Jerde’s picturesque, ersatz, façade-driven shopping centers (loosely rooted in Robert Venturi / Denise Scott Brown’s “Main Street is almost alright” theory —Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966) have so successfully altered both suburban and urban commercial American architecture, that the general public fails to note a complete substitution for real place, real time, and actual communal experience. So complete is the influence of this ubiquitous falseness, it barely matters which shopping center is or isn’t a Jerde product. No reason to hate these locations, but an hour of targeted shopping is long enough for me. I’ve worked as a grip at Universal Studios several times; the Studio is amazing (probably not by design) from any number of angles, yet the adjacent Universal CityWalk is nothing more than a pleasant theme park. I was amused –certainly not annoyed– when a open trailer contraption loaded with tourists observed me eating my light lunch on a pile of 2″ X 8″s during one of those work gigs. There are superior alternatives to the Jerde retail commerce model. Genuine vitality flows naturally from real places offering real experience, including the mundane or serene. Give me a “serious” dead mall (with stores where I want to buy goods) over a Jerde-inspired concoction any day.

Letter to the Editor: Bacon’s Staying Power

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[Published February 25, 1990, Los Angeles Times]

Regarding William Wilson’s Feb. 11 review of the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

I admit to snickering at a recent LACMA exhibition. Not at Francis Bacon’s paintings –I snickered at all the people fawning over Robert Longo’s superficiality. So Bacon belongs to the era of Existentialists and beatniks. Fine. Kurt Schwitters belongs to the era of Dadaists, revolutionaries and prophets. Cezanne and Goya belong to their times. I do not snicker at art because it belongs to another time. 

Francis Bacon has not changed much over the decades. He paints the same images. He chooses to refine, rather than add new techniques. His subjects –death, alienation, violence and sex– remain unchanged. Bacon rescues the viewer from Western “sophistication” of not feeling anything about much of anything. His paintings make us feel. Over and over again.

While his art belongs to another era, his place in art will not pass like so may fads. Wilson’s confused opinions will soon be forgotten. Like his MTV and “electronic culture.” Violence, sex and death do not bore me. Banality does. .